Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/152772
T i m P a tt e r s o n Inquiring Winemaker Good Vintners Keep Wine Writers Honest I will never forget the day I spent blending wines with Steve Pessagno. A dozen years ago, on assignment from Central Coast Adventures, the now-defunct monthly magazine of The Monterey County Herald, a friend and I drove down to Lockwood Vineyard to join the veteran Monterey winemaker as he and his crew assembled the label's flagship red Meritage blend. I had been to some large tastings and done some blending trials for my own garage wines, but I had no idea what I was getting into. Five of us power-tasted our way through about 100 candidate barrels, looking for the choicest lots of all five Bordeaux grapes for the blend. Each barrel got marked with yellow chalk as an A (definite final blend contender), a B (useful if more of this variety is needed) or a C (don't bother), at the rate of about two per minute. Each halfminute evaluation involved popping the bung, pulling wine with a thief and dribbling it into five glasses; swirling, sniffing, staring, sipping and spitting; and finally grading (Steve had more votes), dumping leftover wine back in the barrel, and pounding the bung back in. Over and over. Having never really done this kind of thing before, my palate was shot and my head was reeling by about barrel 28; fortunately, I wasn't making any decisions, and Steve seemed entirely unfazed. Then, while we had a quick lunch, the cellar staff pulled samples from the "A" barrels and mixed up some trial blends, starting with the proportions that had gone into last year's bottling. Steve popped a Van Halen CD into the stereo system, cranked it up nice and loud and started pouring glasses from calibrated beakers for all of us to evaluate. Given the soundtrack volume, the communication was more facial expressions than vocalization. Ten minutes 68 W in e s & V i ne s SE P T E MBE R 20 13 Highlights • day blending with Steve Pessagno A taught the author about how highquality wine is made in the real world. • essagno's training as an engineer was P evident in his eagerness to customize cellar equipment. • e believed the way to build his brand H was by building his region (Monterey), and his hospitality was boundless. into the whirlpool, Steve barked, "This is all wrong!"—meaning not the blend, but the music, which was promptly replaced with some Dave Matthews. Things went much better. After about an hour, we all raised the white flag, well spotted with purple. It took Pessagno and his crew two more days to get it right—mostly, he explained to me later, to the strains of guitar wizard Joe Satriani. The reason this memory is so fresh in my mind is that Steve Pessagno died in his sleep June 8 at the age of 55, way too young. The reason it's the lead-in to this column (being written two weeks later) is that this slightly wacky day taught me volumes about how actual humans make first-class wine in the real world. The genuine article is in another dimension from textbook winemaking, and much more visceral than ethereal visions about the expression of terroir. The heart of winemaking is pushing through the hard stuff—tons of grapes, fermentations that won't take, more samples than any sane person would want to taste at one sitting—and having a ton of fun in the process. I learned a lot that day about what makes successful winemaking tick, and added Steve to my mental Rolodex of smart, engaged winemakers (without whose input this column wouldn't exist). Losing a valuable source in no way compares to losing a father, as his four sons did, or to losing a lifelong colleague, as so many winemakers in Monterey did, or to losing a tireless champion for his wine region, as the entire Monterey wine industry did. But without the hard-earned wisdom of hands-on winemakers, wine writers can easily get unhinged from their subject, as if their opinions determine what's in the bottle, not someone else's bone-crunching labors. Steve was one of my reality checks, and I will sorely miss him. Take it from a production winemaker Over the years, I probably spent less than 24 hours in any form of contact with Steve, counting the blending session and a couple other visits, lots of phone calls and emails, and the occasional shake-and-howdy at trade tastings. Nonetheless, he was one of the folks I recruited to do guest columns earlier this year while I was hibernating with a book manuscript. As it turned out, Steve's take on what they don't teach you in wine school, "Lessons Learned the Hard Way," came out in the June issue of Wines & Vines, a few days before he died. In the column, he offered "a few pearls for the younger winemaking crowd and some 'I remember when that happened to me' anecdotes for winemakers of my generation." For instance, "Remember to periodically (and I might say thrice daily) mix your stuck fermentation tanks while they are being warmed. If you don't, I can guarantee that when you do try to mix the tank, the dissolved CO2 in the partially fermented juice will erupt and eject the contents up through the top manhole toward the winery ceiling. The mess on the ground does look like you lost a lot of wine, but it is usually not that bad. Trust me." Or my very favorite "When an 8-inch must line connected to a positive-displacement pump starts to plug